Recent discoveries highlight important role indigenous music played in Jesuits’ famous missionary zeal

The Jesuits are renowned as hardened missionaries, establishing substantial missions in the likes of South America and the Far East during previous centuries. Less often noted is the fact of how music was an important part of the missionary effort that was one of the founding principles of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit Order), and that outstanding musicians and composers were among the ranks of those who permanently left Europe to lend their musical gifts to the missionary effort. For instance, Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726) had already established himself in Rome as a composer and performer of the first rank before joining the Jesuits and emigrating to Cordoba in what is now Argentina, where he spent the rest of his days assisting the efforts of building up the Catholic Faith in the communes (called “reductions”) that the Jesuits established in a wide area of the continent, encompassing parts of modern day Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Bolivia. Noting the musical aptitude of the indigenous populations, the Jesuits created schools of music within the reductions, not only writing sacred music for the local populations to sing and play, but encouraging indigenous people to compose music themselves. The extent of this production has only been understood recently, through the discovery and editing of thousands of pages of unsigned musical manuscripts discovered in churches and monasteries of the region. Although containing features of the European music of the time, strong indigenous elements are also present. Many of the works are written in indigenous languages such as Chiquitano and Guarani, and probably would have used local Instruments such as Indigenous percussion. Over in the Far East, the first European to enter the Ming dynasty Imperial Chinese capital was the Jesuit missionary-scholar Matteo Ricci (1552 - 1610). When he was invited to Beijing by the Wanli Emperor in 1601, he had already been in the Portuguese enclave of Macau for twenty years, studying Chinese language and culture. Among the gifts he brought the emperor was a harpsichord. The emperor was so intrigued that he sent four of his eunuchs to learn to play it. Ricci founded the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in 1605, the oldest Roman Catholic church in China. In 1608, he published <em>Eight Songs for the Western Keyboard</em>, setting his own Chinese verse to Chinese-style music. Thus began two hundred years of Jesuit influence on Chinese history and culture. The Qing dynasty of the Kangxi Emperor (1661 - 1722) included the founding of an academy for European music under the Portuguese Tomás Pereira; as a result, the emperor was said to have had “harpsichords and spinets in great numbers in all his palaces”. The Qianlong Emperor (1711 - 1799) employed the French Jesuit Jean Joseph Marie Amiot (1718 - 1793) as his translator of European languages. Amiot was also a musician: he transcribed Chinese melodies which he called <em>Divertissements Chinois</em> and set Chinese translations of Catholic hymns such as <em>Salve Regina </em>to traditional melodies. Amiot also brought French baroque music to China, famously performing music by Jean-Philippe Rameau to audiences in the Imperial palace. The different levels of assimilation in the two regions is explained by the differing circumstances that prevailed. In South America, the Jesuits came in the wake of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial enterprises, which established a dominant European culture that supplanted, and in some cases wiped out, the Indigenous cultures. China never experienced colonisation, and the Jesuits achieved their goals by assimilating into the Chinese culture, becoming teachers and advisors to the Chinese elites. In Latin America, Roman Catholicism, as the state religion of the colonising countries, became (and still is) the dominant religion. In China, however, Christianity never became more than a minority faith in a predominantly Confucian culture, even at the height of its influence. London audiences will get a chance to compare these two musical legacies for themselves at a unique event where they will be juxtaposed for the first time. This will take place, most appropriately, at <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/both-english-and-cosmopolitan-the-glory-of-farm-street-church/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Farm Street, the London home of the Jesuits</mark></a>, in a concert offered by a partnership of two recently formed musical ensembles.&nbsp;<br> <em>El Parnaso Hyspano</em>&nbsp;(led by Argentinian tenor of Indigenous extraction, Rafael Montero) is an ensemble dedicated to the authentic performance of early music from Iberia and Latin America, including in Indigenous languages, much of it not yet performed in modern times.&nbsp;<em>Divertissements Chinois</em>&nbsp;(led by harpsichordist Yeo Yat-Soon) explores the fascinating and rarely heard musical links between Europe and China in the 17th and 18th centuries. The ensemble takes its name from a collection of Chinese music transcribed by Amiot. We are calling our concert “Silver and Silk” to represent the most important connection between Latin America and China, which was economic. The silver coins produced by the Spanish Empire in the city of Potosi became the main currency of global trade during the Ming Dynasty, and was used in China to pay for silk and other Chinese commodities coveted by the Europeans. A founding impulse of the Jesuits was to spearhead the counter-reformation. But Protestantism was unheard of in China and Latin America when the Jesuits established their missions. It was Indigenous pre-Christian religions and belief systems that they had to contest. Thus, the Jesuit missions were only counter-reformation projects to the extent that it was the Catholic Faith that reached these regions long before any other version of Christianity could establish itself.&nbsp; Notwithstanding the lack of counter-reformational context, the Jesuit music from Latin America and China remains with us as a particularly vivid and evocative legacy of those turbulent times. <br><br><em>Photo: British actor Jeremy Irons playing one of the Jesuit missionaries in the 1986 film 'The Mission'; screenshot from <a href="https://www.moma.org/">www.moma.org</a>. </em><a href="https://www.moma.org/"><br></a><br><em>John Sloboda, OBE, is Emeritus Professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.</em> <em>The concert 'Silver and Silk: Baroque Music of the Jesuits from Latin America and China' takes place at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street, Mayfair, London, on Friday 28th June at 7.30 p.m.&nbsp;Tickets can be obtained in advance from <a href="https://bit.ly/siverNsilk"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">Eventbrite</mark></a> or on the door (ticket price includes a wine reception). For further details see&nbsp;</em><a href="https://emea01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http://www.elparnasohyspano.com/&data=05|02||6600a78924ba44b4cc6708dc8ac2b7f6|84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa|1|0|638537816222963833|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0=|0|||&sdata=Y4kWMAJp70pgO7H5Taqs8wB56iJLJP8G+r0bh5Bbkds=&reserved=0"><em><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">www.elparnasohyspano.com</mark></em></a><em>.</em>